CPU Wars: The nerdiest card game ever?

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I consider myself extremely fortunate to have a dad who was always around when I was growing up. Well, almost always around. Every Thursday night — around my bedtime, so I can forgive him — he would leave the house to go to a poker game with a group of his friends. Although I have no idea how objectively good he was, most weeks he came home with enough newly won money to buy me something, so I always wanted to learn to play just the way he did.

The older I got, the more willing he was to teach me several different varieties of the game — stud, draw, Texas hold ‘em (his favorite) — but I never quite acquired his level of skill. But if I never got rich off of my meager abilities, I’m at least grateful for the competitive spirit and love of cards that my dad instilled in me.

Those qualities are a big part of what drew me to CPU Wars, which I’m convinced is the nerdiest card game ever (yes, even more so than Magic: The Gathering). The successful product of a Kickstarter campaign from last year, CPU Wars is almost exactly what it sounds like. Each card depicts a different desktop processor, from the Intel 8080 to the AMD Phenom II, along with a list of eight key specs (Max Clock Speed, Max Bus Speed, Introduction Year, Transistor Count, Data Width, Manufacturing Process, Die Size, and Max TDP), so after you and one or two friends divvy up the deck, you compete to see who has the most powerful components. Showing only the top card of your stack, you read off what you think is your chip’s winning attribute; whoever has the best value (highest for things like speeds, lowest for the likes of die size and TDP) takes the cards. Play continues until someone winds up with all the cards, and thus wins — in essence, it’s a high-tech game of trumps.

If that sounds like fun, it is — sort of. I pulled a couple of coworkers into a game, and we enjoyed a few trips around the table until it became evident that I was taking almost every hand. Why? Well, not to put it too bluntly, this is what I do for a living. Even if I can’t rattle off from memory every single feature of the MOS 65xx, as but one example, I know enough about it make sure it never wins against an Intel Pentium III. So because I was able to see my colleagues’ cards, I just had to run a couple of quick calculations in my head, pick the proper spec, and I could win almost every time. I wasn’t trying to cheat, it was just happening naturally. As soon as I felt I had to intentionally “pull back” so I could keep my buddies in the game, that’s when my interest flagged.

To work around this problem, we experimented with some “house rules” versions. In one, you would hold your cards in your hand, someone would shout out a spec, you’d play your best card, and then the winner would take the trick that way; it added some nice meat to the game’s bones. The CPU Wars FAQ suggests using an eight-sided die to randomly select the category, which I like the sound of. I’d personally be interested in combining two or three decks to create a Go Fish variant; my coworkers and I also discussed the possibility of the win condition being a complete collection of Intel or AMD cards (though, because there are more Intel than AMD chips represented in the deck, this would require some finessing). Time alone might also resolve some of the balance issues. The only deck available now is “Volume 1.0,” but already-promised expansion packs could help; and if Volume 2.0 focuses on laptop processors, it could be fascinating to see what happens when they square off against their desktop cousins. And I suspect workable solitaire rules aren’t just possible, but likely.

The good news is that the creators of CPU Wars have made an intriguing first step with it. The fast-paced game play is enjoyable for as long as it lasts, and the cards (the same size and composition, waxy coating and all, as those in a standard 52-card deck) are high in quality, displaying excellent photographs of the processors and clearly readable text. A lot of thought has obviously gone into making CPU Wars look polished and professional.

In its current form, however, CPU Wars is very much a victim of its own good ideas. Certainly not everyone who plays CPU Wars will be as versed in the useless trivia of processor schematics as I am. (Which, let’s face it, is probably a good thing.) But the people most likely to pay $12.50 for a single deck are the people who are, or at least know enough to fake it, and because of that they’re the ones who actually shouldn’t play the game.

I like the concept and the physical execution of CPU Wars so much that I don’t want to see it fade away. It’s nice to have an adult specialty game like this that isn’t of the collectible variety, and actually celebrates broad-spanning awareness of contemporary technology history. A lot of people could learn a lot from it, or at the very least be reminded of what got them interested in computers in the first place. But such a razor-sharp target audience needs something even more dependent on strategy and skill, and that won’t punish anyone for the encyclopedic command of this subject there’s an excellent chance they’ll bring with them to the table.

Perhaps more rule refinements, either by the creators or by enterprising players, will let CPU Wars better achieve its goals. If, like a number of the processors it presents, it gets cool enough to run smoothly, I have a hunch I’ll be playing it often. I may never be a gambling guru, but I know the die size of an IDT WinChip 2. Even if I never get as relatively rich from this as my dad did from his weekly outings, I’m glad there’s finally a game where my knowledge is worth something. I’ll take that over a good poker face any day.

Updated: This post was originally published with Sebastian Anthony listed as the author — when in actual fact, Matthew Murray wrote it.

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